Thessaloniki

Thessaloniki has no housing cooperatives of the kind Zurich or Vienna would recognise. What Greece had instead was the oikodomikos synetairismos (the building cooperative), a way of buying land together. Members pooled savings, bought a plot and built houses or flats. Each unit was then handed over as private property and the cooperative was wound up. Nothing stayed in common. There was no lasting member share, the stake that a resident of a continuing co-op buys on joining and gets back on leaving. The Heinrich Böll Foundation's analysis of whether cooperative housing is possible in Greece describes exactly this dissolve-on-completion model.

From our library

Is cooperative housing possible in Greece?

Greek housing cooperatives remain rare, yet legal reforms, historic attempts, and public‑policy roles hint at untapped potential.

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The form flourished in the post-war suburbs. After 1948 the state granted plots of 1,000 m² in the hills of Panorama to army officers, who founded the Neo Panorama building cooperative. Once the villas were handed over the cooperative vanished, and Panorama became what the city magazine Parallaxi calls Thessaloniki's Beverly Hills. Other groups, including one for veterans of the wartime resistance, followed. A history in Efimerida ton Syntakton concludes that most of them were, in the end, little more than land businesses. Nationally, more than 200 cooperatives with over 150,000 members still sit frozen, many on land later protected from building.

Today's sector is three small clusters, and they face different problems. The first is that dormant legacy of building cooperatives, stuck in planning disputes and tainted by speculation. The second is municipal. The development agency MDAT (the Major Development Agency of Thessaloniki) drives the city's housing work and carries it into European networks. The city belonged to NETCO, the Network of Cities for Collaborative Housing, and now to Cities 4 Co-Housing, an URBACT network led by Brussels Housing that adapts the Brussels community land trust model. The third cluster is civic: researchers, architects and the CoHab platform, which by 2020 already had members in Thessaloniki alongside Athens. The legacy cooperatives are blocked by land law. The new pilots are blocked by the absence of any legal form: there is no explicit legal framework for community land trusts or social housing cooperatives in Greece. And while local government law lets councils lend buildings to social-economy groups, a cooperative needs a concession lasting decades, 60 years in Zurich and 75 in Barcelona.

Organisation in focus

MDAT – Major Development Agency Thessaloniki

Leads Thessaloniki’s social housing strategy, affordable rentals, and co‑housing pilot.

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CITIES 4 CO-HOUSING - Quarterly Network Journal No.1

Community Land Trust lessons: 99-year leases, resale caps, €10m budget, nearly 50 pilot actions.

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That is why the state still gives cooperatives no place in its housing mix. National programmes back individual buyers and private developers, and the municipality treats co-housing as an experiment inside its social rental agency. The Cities 4 Co-Housing investment plan for Thessaloniki is the first Greek document to cost a pilot on cost-rental principles, with rents set to cover costs rather than track the market. It draws on the European evidence gathered in Housing Cooperatives in Europe and names the legal gaps national law would have to close first.

Greek housing policy is written in Athens, by the Ministry of Social Cohesion and Family under Domna Michailidou. Its package now counts more than 45 measures worth over €6.5bn. The largest is Spiti mou II (My Home II), which lends to buyers under 50 with half of each loan interest-free from the EU Recovery Fund. It has approved 15,026 loans from a €2bn budget, and the last contracts had to be signed by 31 August 2026. Tenants now get a month's rent back every November, a refund paid to 877,267 beneficiaries in its first round. A tax exemption rewards landlords who return a long-empty flat or a holiday let to long-term tenants.

The newer tools try to build a non-market tier on public land. Law 5229/2025 created koinoniki antiparochi (social land-for-flats), in which a private builder develops public land and hands at least 30% of the new homes back for social use. In western Thessaloniki the former Ziaka army camp in Eleftherio-Kordelio is due to become 1,034 homes, paid for by the Social Climate Fund, with a tender this year and first keys in 2027. Michailidou calls it the government's flagship housing intervention.

Lighthouse project

Ziaka Camp social housing (Eleftherio-Kordelio)

Former army camp on 130‑acre rail corridor slated for 1,034 affordable homes by 2027.

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The city itself holds buildings rather than money. Under Mayor Stelios Angeloudis, in office since January 2024, it has started to use them. MDAT runs a social rental agency that renovates empty, publicly owned flats and lets them on leases of at least 8 years at rents well below the market. Pressure from below is growing. The Thessaloniki Tenants' Union wants the council to put at least 2% of its budget into social housing. Meriç Özgüneş, who coordinates the city's social rental agency, co-wrote a policy brief for the Foundation for European Progressive Studies that sets out the progressive case for permanent affordable stock.

Empty homes get a mix of incentives and one restriction. Since 1 July 2026 no new short-term rental registrations are issued in the city's central municipal district, covering the historic centre, the waterfront and Ladadika. At the International Fair in September the prime minister extended the freeze to the end of 2027. A new Anakainizo (Renovate) scheme pays up to 95% of the cost of repairing an empty pre-1990 flat if the owner lets it long-term for five years. A penalty tax on vacant homes has been considered but not adopted. The European case for reclaiming vacant spaces as homes is well made; in Thessaloniki the social rental agency is the working local version.

Climate policy points the same way. Thessaloniki holds the EU Mission Label as one of the EU's climate-neutral and smart cities. In 2026 the European Investment Bank lent it €30m for an investment programme framed by its Climate Neutrality Plan 2030. The Exoikonomo (Energy Saving) grants have upgraded the homes of more than 100,000 households nationwide. Reusing the empty stock rather than building on open land is the lower-carbon route. In homes that are costly to heat, energy poverty and the housing crisis are the same problem.

The argument splits along a familiar line. The government bets on helping people buy, rent and renovate in the market, adding targeted supply on public land. The opposition and the tenants' movement argue that subsidising demand in a market this tight mostly lifts prices, and that Greece needs a permanent non-market tier. The Housing Market Pulse, a study of Greek demand and supply rigidities, weighs the two sides in market terms.

Housing Thessaloniki, the social rental agency run by MDAT, is the city's clearest proof that empty homes can become affordable ones. With €1.1m from the Recovery Fund it is renovating 40 vacant flats owned by public bodies and letting them to vulnerable households at an average rent of €225 a month. Energy upgrades come with the renovation, which is why Horizon magazine singled it out among Europe's answers to energy poverty. A further 60 flats are planned, and the approach won MDAT a European Housing Innovation Award.

Lighthouse project

Housing Thessaloniki – Social Rental Agency

35,000 vacant homes repurposed, 40‑unit pilot, funded by the Recovery and Resilience Facility.

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Siatistis Street is where the city may build its first co-housing. The listed building belongs to the neighbouring Municipality of Thermi. It can hold around 10 to 11 homes for single mothers, older residents and Housing First tenants. The estimated capital cost is €800,000 to €1.2m. The pilot grew out of Cities 4 Co-Housing, and the investment plan includes a statute starter kit for the future residents' association. It is costed but not yet funded. When the network met in the city in February 2026, partners also toured a newly renovated social housing building on Alexandrias Street.

REACT, launched by the municipality with UNHCR in 2016, showed early that a city without public stock can still run social letting across scattered flats. It targeted 888 accommodation places in private apartments across Thessaloniki, Neapoli-Sykies and Kalamaria, working with the NGOs ARSIS and PRAKSIS. The same partners later piloted Housing First in the city, as part of the URBACT ROOF network.

The Ziaka camp development is the state's bet on scale. It is the most advanced of the disused army camps earmarked for homes. It would bring affordable homes to the western districts, where rents are already the city's lowest. Its tenure and management are still undecided, which leaves room for a non-profit or cooperative operator.

The Pavlos Melas camp next door went another way. It opened in June 2026 as a metropolitan park, and by summer 2027 it will house the Museum of Refugee Hellenism. That museum will tell the story of the families who once built Thessaloniki's housing with their own hands.

So what kind of housing does a city of refugees, students and empty flats build for itself? The pieces are on the table: a rental agency that works, a costed co-housing pilot, an army camp waiting for an operator, and tens of thousands of empty homes. What Thessaloniki has not yet done is give them a tenure that lasts longer than one lease or one programme.